OMG, that's an interesting project! And I originally wanted to spend this day without too much web reading.
Some of the comments are... educational.
The very fact that you think it's acceptable to ask ... disturbs me greatly. The very fact that you think it's reasonable to want ... strikes me as a symptom of ... at its worst.
The request constitutes ... just as much as the actual ... does.
There are many people in this world ... who would never walk up to a stranger and ask ... We are taught from an early age not to do this, to exercise what is typically called societal restraint. It's impolite to do this to strangers, we are taught. You are proposing a system to make the question permissible.
This illustrates that the so-called conflict between Guess culture and Ask culture cannot be solved by merely saying "here we have a opt-in subgroup which uses different communication rules". Some things are merely difficult to guess correctly, and that can be fixed by improving the communication system. But some things are genuinely taboo... so creating a better communication system about them would cause an outrage.
At the first sight, they may both seem the same to an outsider or a clueless insider, because both are something that is simply never talked about. Therefore, as the first step, we have to find out whether X is "generally okay, just difficult to coordinate" or "forbidden". If something is considered intrinsically wrong, creating a more reliable and more consensual communication system is solving the wrong problem. (It would also be necessary to make the system secret, or at least plausibly deniable. But that makes coordination even more difficult.) And we should actually be thankful to people who openly admit they believe it is intrinsically wrong, as opposed to e.g. rationalizing about imperfections in the communication system, etc.
(I am not sure how to feel about an argument that there ain't no such thing as consent, because people can always be pressured into consent e.g. by ostracism; and therefore, if it is morally wrong to do X against someone's will, then it is wrong to allow X even among consenting people. It has a point; but applied consistently it would mean you shouldn't interact with anyone, ever. Which I guess means that the only practical way to apply this is to have a social consensus about when to use it and when to ignore it, which will be decided by the high-status people. And by the way, merely saying that there should be a way to do X, implies that X is good, which already creates a pressure on people to do X. -- Another interesting generalizable argument was that allowing consensual X is wrong, because some people would get more consent and some wouldn't get any, and they would feel horrible; therefore it is better to keep it a general taboo, so no one feels personally rejected. -- Also, people have a right not to know that your subculture exists. = I should probably use all these to create a random activity-criticism generator. Or even a complete flamewar generator, because there are also predictable responses.)
If there is a culture with a taboo against hugging, where people who want to hug others are perceived as morally depraved and dangerous, providing "hugs" tags for people would be risky.
By the way, the system mentioned in the article used two clearly explicit steps (some commenters may have misunderstood this, or may have reacted to the early stages before the protocol was established). The protocol was: (1) opt in by wearing a tag; (2) ask people with the tag whether it is okay to do X; (3) do X. Which means that under this protocol no one should even be asked without consenting to be asked first. -- This two-step consent is probably a good idea for controversial topics, although I would like to also have a one-step alternative. For example "it is okay to ask if you can hug me" and "it is okay to hug me even without asking first".
(I wanted to stay meta, but here is an object-level note: It would have been better to call it "Open Source Touching Project"; because other body parts were also allowed, but many people in discussions objected to the title. Also, there is a valid objection that doing some things in public may be illegal, so it is wrong to do such things at a convention without explicit permission of the organizers.)
So finally - with two weeks distance to the first European LessWrong Community Weekend - we want to share the organizers’ perception of the event, including a short overview of what went well, what did not and what exceeded our expectations.
First and foremost we thank all the participants and speakers for helping us in making this such a great weekend. We had an incredible time and are very happy everything worked out as well as it did. In our opinion the event was a great success! Meeting everyone was excellent and we look forward to running a similar yet improved event in the future.
One of the awesome things about the event were the group dynamics. The general feeling was that the participants were open and had a generally positive attitude towards each other. Even some people who usually prefer to avoid crowds expressed that it was a safe place to try different things and to improve their social skills.
Two things that strongly supported the pervasive feeling of community and friendship were the extraordinarily high frequency of hugs and the cheerful sentiment of the LessWrong study hall people that spilled over to the Community Weekend participants.
We wanted to encourage hugging by letting people put a “accepting hugs as a form of greeting” sticker on their extended name tags. To our surprise it was adopted by a huge majority and had an immense effect on social interactions by creating an atmosphere of familiarity. One story about this (anonymously shared in the post event survey) reads:
The workshop presentations strongly engaged the audience and made us all participants. While this was a great thing in itself the downside was that the time planning for most of the speakers didn’t work out. It cost us a considerable fraction of the planned 30min breaks between talks. The lesson learned: reserve way more time for questions than usual when talking to a LW crowd and actively moderate, too.
A lot of people (including us) noticed that this way the talks took too much of the time meant for discussion and socializing. Building new connections between the LWers of Europe and strengthening existing ones was the main focus of the event. A lot of this happened in the evenings when people just went to a park to play ultimate frisbee or to climb trees and learn partner acrobatics.
The wide range of topics and and the high quality of discussions in general was amazing. One especially notable case is a socratic dialogue that emerged from one of the the group discussions on the first evening. The depth of discussion and the clear thinking we achieved was amazing. The moderator of the discussion will write a detailed post on the specifics soon.
Our estimations of the number of interested LWers were way too pessimistic. Even our 90% confidence intervals fell short of the actual number of participants signing up. While we were able to increase the size of the event beyond the planned maximum by 25% we still had to reject many applications.
Organizing this event was a great experience for us and we intend to do this again. We have learned a lot and got great feedback: The next event will be even more awesome, with more time and space for discussions and and social activities. We have already started planning and preparing the bigger and better:
+++ European LessWrong Community Weekend 2015 +++
Our hope is that this will become a regular event providing a meeting and socializing space for the LWers in Europe. Other groups around Europe already showed interest in hosting similar events so that it might be alternating between cities in the future.
Upcoming posts to look out for:
Looking forward to seeing you again
John, Tristan, Alexander, Matthias, Christian… & everyone else from the Berlin LessWrong meetup